First, the safety switches fail, then the activation switch fails. All Union made. I knew those unions had to be good for something.

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"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me . . . Anything can happen, child. Anything can be"

Quite difficult matters can be explained even to a slow-witted man, if only he has not already adopted a wrong opinion about them; but the simplest things cannot be made clear even to a very intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, and knows indubitably, the truth of the matter under consideration. -Leo Tolstoy

The big risk and the one we game with homeland and FEMA when we play games, is the dirty bomb. why? it's easy. it doesn't even have to be a good one. it just has to spread enough contamination to cause mass evacuation, and lot of fear.

There's a huge amount of unaccounted for material especially in the old USSR and some of their testing grounds. there's unexploded ordinance and contaminated material just laying out all over the place.

bring it across either border. spread it around or blow up a few dozen contaminated smallish bombs and you have evacuated downtown LA,or NY, or......do it right, and no one goes back in.

then there's the EMP from the rocket fired from a container ship out in the ocean....the diseased vacationers spreading some GM disease around the country.......

but, if you worry about it all, you won't sleep at night. it's in gods hands...and hopefully some alert security folks.....

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.....The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved.....

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me . . . Anything can happen, child. Anything can be"

How about enlightening me about whom pays the bills for the Los Alamos National Laboratory? If it’s not the Feds paying the salaries of 9000 people, then just what private industry has $2.2 billion of spare change a year to dump into an entity that is not profitable?

>How about enlightening me about whom pays the bills for the Los Alamos National Laboratory? If it’s not the Feds paying the salaries of 9000 people, then just what private industry has $2.2 billion of spare change a year to dump into an entity that is not profitable?

The Government pays contractor companies to build all of their "stuff". Most of the people working at most government facilities are what the government calls "contractors" which is to say people who are employed by a contracting company that is contracting with some branch of the U.S. Government. The Government pays the bills, of course, to the contracting company who pays their employees. But if the subject is equipment used by the government (e.g. electrical switches) all of that is put out to bid and purchased from the low bidder or it's bought from some company at GSA pricing (avoiding the bid process). The US government does not manufacture things. They either buy it "off the shelf", or they contract to have it designed and produced if it's not readily available. The Government might draw up the specs but they don't even design things, they contract to have that done. Even the Army Corps of Engineers does not build anything. They are the general contractors of the US Government. They might draw up the specs and then they put it out to bid and then they oversee getting it done. But they do not build things. In the entire history of the US, they never have.